“I will push you down this staircase. I don’t want to, but I will push you down the stairs and then throw you through a window.”

  Jane drifted out of sleep to hear Bella speaking in her most threatening tones. The squeaky male voice that answered was tinged with fear.

  “I am an official courier from the Council of Glenfall! I need to deliver this missive into the hands of the Archmage Candidate herself!”

  “Jane, which is her name, is sleeping. Are you a doctor?”

  “No.”

  “Are you her best friend?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a mysterious voice that comes from her floorboards? Or… that guy? Hi, Allen.”

  This question took a bit longer to answer, likely due to its sheer weirdness.

  “No. Neither.”

  “Then I’ll take that letter.” There was a faint sound of paper being snatched. “You now have ten seconds to leave, or I am making you leave. I’m not even going to have Allen help. I’m going to scream the entire time so everyone watches. I’m a big scary best friend and…”

  The door slammed. Apparently, the squeaker had been convinced.

  In the silence that followed, Jane decided to assess her personal state, starting with her magical side. The resulting picture was not great. She had badly overdrawn her strength. Every part of her that interacted with the mystical realm felt like it had been scraped by coarse sandpaper. There was no other word for it besides raw. She had been chewed up and spit out by her own questionable decision-making, and it would probably be weeks before she was quite right.

  On the bright side, nothing looked broken. That was luckier than Jane could have hoped for. What she was dealing with right now was the magical equivalent of a bad sprain piled on top of blisters and far too much exercise. It wasn’t good, not by any means. But she wasn’t metaphorically broken or literally dead.

  That was all there was to see regarding her magical state, other than a suspiciously water-oriented feel to her personal magic stores that she could check out later. Her physical body wasn’t noticeably hurt either, except a bit of scuffing on her skin from being dumped through windows onto rough roofs. She was just very tired and didn’t much want to get out of bed.

  She decided to anyway. Allen was downstairs, after all.

  Just as she started to move, however, Bella came rushing into the room.

  “Oh no, you don’t.” Bella tossed a sealed envelope onto Jane’s bedside table and gently grabbed her shoulders. “Not without help, dummy.”

  With Bella’s assistance, Jane sat up in bed and leaned back against the pillows. At some point during the night, Bella had apparently cleaned her up and put her into fresh nightclothes, which Jane appreciated.

  “What time is it? How long was I out?”

  “It’s getting towards late afternoon. You’ve been asleep all day, or ever since super early this morning. Whenever that thing happened.” Bella gave the pillows an unnecessarily forceful pat. “How could you scare me like that? I was so scared, Jane.”

  Jane nodded. “Understandable. It was a huge water dragon.”

  “No! Not the dragon!” Bella briefly looked like she wanted to shake Jane. “You scared me, doing all of that to yourself. Did you know you screamed for half of it?”

  “I didn’t.” This was true. It hadn’t felt great, but Jane had no idea she had made it that obvious. “And I’m sorry. But if I didn’t do something, people were going to get swept into the lake. Or the bridges were going to come down. I had to keep that from happening.”

  Bella sighed and sat down on the bed. “I know. Which is why I can yell at official messengers. They know it too. Everyone knows it. Word is there have been blasts of messages to the town’s long-range circles, telling them to support whatever you decided to do. But you aren’t doing anything else until you are rested up and healthy again. That’s my rule. It’s a requirement for being my friend, and that’s before we talk about what risks you are allowed to take after that. Do you understand?”

  Jane gulped. She still would have done everything she had done, even knowing that it would upset Bella this much, but it did hurt to know she had caused her friend so much distress.

  “Fine. But what am I going to do, then?”

  “Oh, I’m way ahead of you on that. You’ll be pleased to know you have seen every doctor in town already, and thus don’t have to deal with any of that. One will come by in a few days to check on you. For now, it’s just fun.” Turning, Bella yelled down the staircase. “Allen? Bring everyone up. And chairs. And that stupid thing you made.”

  “Everyone?” Jane repeated.

  Everyone was everyone. Emily, Brit, Allen, and Sadie all joined them in Jane’s room a few seconds later. Brit and Emily were particularly interesting, not because Jane wanted to see them more than Allen, but because they were holding what appeared to be thirty or forty pounds of food, all piled up in crates.

  Jane’s stomach growled loudly at the sight of the sustenance, but she tried to ignore it. “You guys shouldn’t have made me that. Really.”

  “We didn’t,” Brit said. “While we were waiting outside for Bella to tell us we could visit, neighbors kept loading us up with food. Especially people with little kids. They seemed to be thankful you got them out of the way of that wave.”

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  It took a few minutes for Jane to forget the awkwardness of being the only person present wearing bedclothes, propped up like a mannequin and weaker than an infant. The food helped. Bella made her a plate, picking out individual bites of dozens of things ranging from cakes to breads to bacon and eggs, all different from each other but each pulling their weight in an endless train of calories.

  It also helped that Jane was unnaturally hungry, in the way that only big expenditures of magic could cause. She couldn’t bother with awkwardness too long.

  “Well, at least she can eat.” Sadie smiled at Jane, who was swallowing a final double-sized mouthful of eggs and bread. “That’s a good sign.”

  “I can always eat. It’s a talent.” Jane reached for a cookie and sat back with it, giving the full meal she had already consumed time to sort itself out in her stomach. “Although I’m glad people do so much walking here. I’d be getting fat otherwise.”

  Allen leaned forward in his chair. “That’s something I wanted to know about. Why do you even come find us when you need us? Why not just get the road to call us for you, like last night?”

  “For one thing, I’d be broadcasting the invitation to every single person from here to there. It’s not a very selective spell. For another…” Jane raised her arms and let them flop down on the bed, limp and hopefully pathetic-looking. “It takes a lot out of me.”

  Brit whistled. “I would have thought it was the dragon-rebuking. That seems like the real power-hog.”

  “It wasn’t rebuking. I just asked it to leave,” Jane said. “Which, yes, takes a lot of power. But the part that hurt the most was the orientation of the magic. Because I don’t like talking. It makes things like messaging a lot harder for me.”

  Everyone in the room paused a moment before bursting into laughter.

  “What?” Jane demanded.

  “Sorry.” Bella clapped her on the leg, still giggling. “It’s just that we don’t know much about magic. Emily knows the most, and she doesn’t really know anything. We didn’t expect magic to be particularly hard because you are shy. Either way, thanks. We already knew it was hard, and you probably saved a lot of people. Now get that contraption out, Allen. I want to use it.”

  Allen opened the leather sack he had brought with him and pulled out a miniature catapult of sorts, complete with several small felt beanbags. Jane could tell he had tried to make them look like boulders. Retrieving a metal hoop from the same bag, he handed it to Brit.

  “Brit, put this on the wall for me. The far wall. Thanks.” Allen brought the catapult to Jane’s hand, then lifted her finger to a small wheel on the side of it. “You crank it down with this wheel. Then you can launch the little boulders over there, through that loop Brit put on the wall. It’s not easy, though.”

  Flushing a bit from the touch of his hand, she cranked the wheel to arm the catapult, which obediently bent itself backward with stored energy.

  “Now we just load the boulder, and you pull this little lever,” Allen explained. “I thought I‘d make these as toys, to sell to parents with kids. They aren’t very hard to build.”

  Jane nodded and pulled the lever, releasing the boulder across the room.

  It caught Brit flat on his ear. He yelped and scrambled out of the way as everyone else had a quick laugh at his expense.

  “Yup. Those will sell,” Bella declared. “You are going to be rich, Allen. Now let me have that.”

  Once the first person figured out the right amount of tension to move the bags without over-powering them, they had a game going. They kept score with a charcoal pencil and paper, slowly eliminating players as they worked through several rounds. Jane was pleased to last right up until the end, but finally missed a shot, leaving Brit and Allen to compete against each other for the win.

  “What do you think?” Brit asked, lining up a shot. Bella bent over the contraption to examine his work. “Is it enough?”

  “I hope not,” Allen told him. “If you make this one, I lose. And then you get the last cookie.”

  Bella shook her head. “We are never running out of cookies. There are pounds of them. The neighbors did not mess around on that front. But I still need you to win, Brit.” She straightened up, held her finger out to test the wind, and put her hand between Brit’s shoulder blades. “One more click worth of turning.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No. Do it anyway, because I said.”

  Brit gave the catapult one last quarter-turn of power. The room held its breath as he chunked the lever and let fly.

  He and Bella were jump-hugging before the boulder soared through the hoop, confident from the launch that they had done it. Watching them, Jane noted with a raised eyebrow that their hands never quite separated with the rest of them. Things finally seemed to be moving along in that quarter, and she was glad.

  She was also glad to have company. With her friends there, it was easy to put everything else out of mind.

  Somewhere, there were city officials who were dying to see her. Somewhere else, her aunt was racing to town, probably in a dead panic. In yet another place, there were people who were thankful for her help, and probably other people who were just frightened of her. But here, there were only friends, laughing and poking fun at each other for an hour or two.

  “I have to go,” Emily said regretfully after another few minutes. “And I’m taking Sadie. There’s some cleanup work to do around the library and Xand’s office, and we are still helping people who live near the shoreline to get their houses dried out.”

  “Maybe I can help with that?” Jane double-checked her magic, then sighed. Even the act of examining it hurt enough to put any thought of wizard’s solutions for conventional problems right out of her mind. “Oh. I guess I can’t help.”

  “You definitely can’t,” Bella said firmly. “But I can. I’m going to go cook up some supper in one of the public parks. Not everyone has access to their normal kitchen right now, so we are handling it like a public holiday. The city released some funds for food. All they need now is labor. I’m taking this guy along to carry my things.”

  She pushed Brit’s shoulder. For once, he was lost enough in thought not to play along with the conceit that Bella could actually move a big blacksmith if he didn’t want to be moved. She spent a few seconds staring in consternation at where her hand met his unmoving shoulder before he came to with a blink. He then let her drag him out the door, immediately followed by the other two girls.

  Jane wished she could go with them, but her will to pretend at ‘being okay’ seemed to be fading with the setting sun. She yawned in a huge, uncontrolled way and then snapped her mouth shut as she realized what it must look like to Allen.

  What it must look like to Allen, and what Allen looks like to me, and what it looks like for the two of us to be here, right now. Alone.

  Allen must have been thinking along similar lines. He began to pack up the catapult and little boulders a bit too fast, dropping them into the bag so hard that she was worried the fun little toy would break.

  Him being like this was a nice thing, Jane decided. He was always a little terrified of her, just as she was of him. This made her comfortable with her own fears. At the same time, it made her feel safe in a few other, very important ways.

  She weighed that safe feeling against what she expected it would feel like to be alone at the moment. Jane wasn’t afraid of being alone, exactly. It wouldn’t be fear she felt if Allen left. She would just feel sad, and she didn’t feel quite up to that currently.

  “Don’t go.” Jane patted the bed beside her. “Come sit. If you don’t have anything else you need to do, I mean.”

  “I don’t. But are you sure…”

  “I know how it looks. I don’t care.” Jane let her head melt down into the pillow, covering half her face but only part of her embarrassment. “I don’t want to be lonely right now. Don’t forget to take off your shoes.”

  “My shoes?”

  “You can’t just sit on the edge. You’ll have to put your feet up.”

  Allen obeyed. Soon enough, Jane was in bed with a fully clothed, visibly uncomfortable man. She almost felt bad for him. He really wasn’t used to this kind of thing. Not that she was, either. But she was too tired to care, and getting more tired with each passing second.

  “So what do I do?” Allen said. “I mean it. I don’t know what to do here.”

  “Just put an arm over me. So I know you are there.”

  Jane didn’t even remember him doing it. She was asleep before she had any chance to enjoy it.

  .